“How did you get on?” his sister-in-law asked him later.
“Oh, it’s quite a decent sort of little mouse,” he said. “Wants to make sure you see how cultivated it is, quotes poetry—what?—and talks about art. It’s a little touching and all that to see how busy it is putting all its poor little stock in the tiny shop-window.”
Maisie, alone in her room, was walking up and down, trailing the lavender satin, recalling with kindled eyes and red-rose cheeks every word, every look of her cavalier. How kindly he had spoken, yet how deferentially; how he had looked, how he had smiled! At dinner she supposed it was his business to talk to her. But afterwards, when she was sitting, a little forlornly and apart from the noisy chatter of the bright-plumaged house-party, how he had come straight over to her directly the gentlemen came into the drawing-room! And she felt that she had not been wanting to herself on so great an occasion.
“I know I talked well. I’m certain he saw directly that I wasn’t a silly idiot.”
She lay long awake, and, as the men trooped up the stairs, she tried to fancy that she could already distinguish his footsteps.
The letter she wrote to her mother next day was, compared to those other lying letters, as a lit chandelier to a stable-lantern. And the mother knew the difference.
“Poor darling!” she thought. “She must have been very miserable all this time. But she’s happy now, God bless her!”
By the week’s end, every thought, every dream, every hope of Maisie’s life was centred in the Honourable James; her tenderness, her ambition turned towards him as flowers to the sun.
And her happiness lighted a thousand little candles all around her. No one could see the candles, of course, but every one saw the radiant illumination of her beauty. And the other men of the house-party saw it too. Even Lord Yalding distinguished her by asking whether she had read some horrid book about earthworms.
“You’re making a fool of that girl, Jim,” said Lady Yalding. “I really think it’s too bad.”